Okay, it’s Freaky Friday. I’m a little late to this party, but apparently there has been an active movement on the Internet, driven by people committed to exposing the hidden cameras and microphones that are embedded in the digital television converter boxes that are being bought by millions of people with the help of our federal government. If this is news for you to, then check out the YouTube video that exposes the proof:
I hoped that you watched the clip before reading on. The fact is that the guy who made that clip originally intended to make a clip to prove his friend wrong about some nefarious conspiracy brewed up by “them” (whomever “them” might be). But as he got into it, he thought it would be a lot funnier to prove his friend right. So with a hot melt glue gun and some components scavanged from a defunct cell phone, he created the “proof” that many have been seeking. Never mind that the boxes aren’t attached to the Internet or a phone line, and have no way to communicate back to the mothership; there’s always a core group of people who want to believe what they think is the worst case scenario.
In this case, they’re wrong. There are no video cameras or hidden microphones designed to spy on you as you watch television. So you can strip to your skivvies and belt down your favorite brew with the confidence of knowing that your converter box is not watching you. However, I’m not making any promises about your cable set top box….
Yes, now is a great time to buy a flat screen TV if you have the money. As I predicted, the manufacturers and retailers are stuck with inventory, and need to get some cash out of the products. The SuperBowl is behind us, and there’s only March Madness between now and next September that might entice sports fans to shell out for a new big screen. (I’m sorry, but I don’t think that the Stanley Cup or U.S. Open will sell a lot of TVs.)
Amazing prices abound, but here are a two deals worth noting. CompUSA.com (now owned by Tiger) is offering the 40″ Sony KDL40S4100 for $799.99, and the 46″ Sony KDL46S4100 for $999.99. These are 1080p models with three HDMI inputs and a bunch of other attractive features. They also are new, and not refurb units, with a one-year warranty from Sony. A year ago, you would have paid $1,200 for a 720p version of the 40″ model, and about $2,100 for a 46″ 1080p model from Sony. So now these are now at about half the price. That’s a big price cut.
I also got mail from a reader who was able to find some attractive prices at the Circuit City sell-out. He found the Samsung LN52A750 for $2,029.99, and the LN52A650 for $1,899.99. Both are 52″ LCD sets with 120 Hz refresh rates, but the 750 series has more connectivity features. A year ago, the lesser 550 series model was selling for about $2,800, so these prices are about $1,000 lower in comparison when you factor in the 120 Hz and other added features. (One warning: make sure that anything you buy from Circuit City is under factory warranty, because if it’s dead on arrival, you’re not likely to get any satisfaction from the liquidators. And get it in writing.)
I’m sure we can all come up with plenty of examples if we wanted to play “Top This”, but the big point here is that these large sizes are not selling. Right now, cash is king, and if you’ve got the money to buy one, you should be able to strike an even better deal than what’s on the price tag.
Netflix has clearly seen the writing on the wall, and is transitioning its business from distributing plastic disks to providing subscription access to movies delivered over the Internet. Hulu, Joost, and other sites are feeding a growing consumer demand for content delivered on demand over broadband. Now comes word that the largest video subscription services in the country — the cable and satellite TV companies — are exploring the Internet as a means of delivering their content.
There were numerous reports this week that Comcast is exploring initiatives with content providers as well as competitors including Time Warner Cable and DirecTV. Much like the Netflix “all you can eat” online access to movies for subscribers, this new approach would let users with cable or satellite subscriptions watch content online in addition to receiving it from their set top box. This design will free viewers from the physical cable, and let them watch anywhere they have access to the Internet, either around the home or when traveling.
The companies have a lot of technology and business work to do before you’ll be able to boot up HBO in the airport, but it’s clear that they see this as a viable model for future content delivery (not to mention that Internet on-demand delivery could provide some relief from the bandwidth constraints that these services are experiencing). It may be just a matter of time before the concept of a “television channel” is lost to history.
The new Samsung Delve has a touch screen, 2 MP camera, Web browsing, and the other sorts of features that you’d expect on a mobile phone these days. And it accepts microSD memory cards. But if you buy one from Alltel Wireless before April 16, you can also get a free 2 GB microSD card. That’s not too exciting, I realize, except for the fact that the card is not empty when you get it. Paramount Pictures will put the movie Mission: Impossible on the card so you can watch it on the phone. And they’ll also put on Mission: Impossible 2, as well as Mission: Impossible 3. Yup, the whole trilogy on a memory card so you can watch them on the small screen any time you want. You can find out more about the deal at http://www.samsungmobileusa.com/missionexcitement/.
Okay, is this deal going to sell cellphones? I don’t really know. But it’s a fascinating bellwether for the whole question of delivering video content on mobile phones. Is a three-inch screen going to be big enough for American viewers who are more accustomed to wide open spaces than their European or Japanese counterparts? Will some of the new ventures that aim to deliver television programming to cell phones be successful, and what will it take to get consumers to sign up? There have been studies that indicate a pent up demand for video on the tiny screen, as it gives the viewer the ultimate in wherever, whenever, whatever control of their viewing. You don’t argue over who has the remote control when only one person can see the screen at a time.
So it will be interesting to watch and see whether other movie deals get bundled with cell phones. This could be the start of a whole new trend.
Last year, nearly 5 million viewers watched more than 5 million hours of online coverage of the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship, also known as “March Madness”. This year, CBSSports.com is relying on Microsoft’s Silverlight media player to deliver the sights and sounds of the 2009 tournament starting March 19. Coverage will include all 63 games, all for free. Check out ncaa.com/mmod for more information and to download the player.
The player will have the familiar “Boss Button” (can anybody say with a straight face that this won’t impact productivity?), but the other feature to note is that video quality will be tied to bandwidth. If you have 550 Kbps bandwidth for your Internet connection, you can watch the standard quality. If your broadband gives you 1.5 Mbps or better, however, you get to watch in “high quality”. The CBSSports press release does not specifiy the resolution of the better image, but does mention “high-definition quality” in the “enhanced” player so it sounds as though you’ll get an HD image.
Now might be a good time to figure out how to connect your notebook computer to that big screen or projector in the conference room. Of course, you’ll only watch during your lunch hour, right?
At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, Samsung announced the first mobile phones with a projector built into it. The Samsung phones use a DLP imager from Texas Instruments. The high-end phones also feature an OLED touchscreen and a 5 megapixel camera. Initially, the I7410 and W7900 phones will only be available in Korea and Europe, but you can expect them to make their way to this country sooner or later.
This is significant because there have been pico projectors designed to be companions for mobile phones, but this builds it right into the handset so there’s only one piece to carry. And why would you want a projector? As we move from just audio to text to still photos to motion video including mobile television, users will want to share the screen’s contents with others. Three people peering at a 3″ LCD screen doesn’t work as well as when they can all look at a 30″ image projected on a handy wall or other surface. And I expect that this will lead to synergistic applications that we don’t even know that we want. While at lunch with a client, use the mobile phone to access a PowerPoint file on your computer back in the office so that you can make a presentation on the back of the menu. I predict that some sort of application like this will become as essential as Twitter or some other function that we didn’t know we couldn’t live without ten years ago.
Tuesday was supposed to be the day that all full-power TV stations were to end their analog broadcasts. Congress delayed that switch until June 12, but allowed stations to switch on February 17th as planned if they wanted to, and if the FCC approved their application. As a result, 421 stations pulled the plug on their analog broadcasts on Tuesday night. Now comes the news that the FCC was surprised to find that they had fewer phone calls at their toll free hotline yesterday than they had expected: about 28,000.
I can’t say that I see this as a huge success. First, do you know the FCC hotline phone number? I didn’t think so. (It’s 888-CALL-FCC.) If you lose a TV station and you open up the phone book, you’re not going to find that number. Instead, you’re more likely to call your local station to find out what the heck has happened to your TV. According to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), local TV stations averaged between 50 and 200 calls for help or information in the first 12 hours after the analog broadcasts stopped. So if every station received 100 calls, that would be a total of 42,100 more calls, bringing the total to about 60,000. That doesn’t sound too good.
And note that the NAB statistics were for the first 12 hours after the change. Presumably that covers midnight to noon local time for the various markets. Huh? I don’t think that there is a lot of television watching going on then. Let’s see the statistics about last night’s call volume, when the viewers came home and couldn’t find their prime time programming.
And there’s one more cloud around this silver lining. The FCC discouraged a number of stations from switching on Tuesday, because the FCC wanted at least one “top four network affiliate station” — ABC, CBS, Fox, or NBC — broadcasting analog in every market. So for the vast majority of viewers, they did not lose access to analog broadcasts of the most popular programming.
So from where I sit, the 421 stations that stopped broadcasting in analog on Tuesday night do not represent the nation as a whole, and the “lack of problems” is not a reliable indicator of what we’re going to encounter in June. I’d love to be wrong, but I still think we’re headed for a train wreck this summer.
When it comes to the transition to digital broadcasts of television programming, the elephant in the room has been the fact that many people who can receive analog transmissions just fine may not get digital transmissions. As I’ve discussed here many times, a weak analog signal produces a snowy image, but a weak digital signal results in a blank screen. The problem is that not enough people are aware of this, or what they can do about it.
The FCC has addressed this issue with some new online resources. Some might say that it’s a little bit late for this information — especially if the original transition date of yesterday had been upheld – but we’ll be generous and file this under the Better Late than Never category.
Go to http://www.dtv.gov/fixreception.html. There, you’ll find two publications (available as Web pages or PDF downloads) that discuss how to fix reception problems. Some of the tips are excellent, such as the fact that you can move a rabbit-ear antenna just inches and it can make a huge difference in your reception. I live in an area of moderate to weak signals, so I tried playing with some rabbit ears that I have connected to a secondary TV set. They work okay for analog reception, but when I tried them with a converter box, I only got two stations and the signal was too weak to watch because the picture kept breaking up.
I tried moving the antenna about two feet away, and scanned again. This time I got a dozen stations, and most of them were strong enough to watch. I set the converter box control to show the signal strength, and then I tried tweaking the settings. The result was a noticeable improvement. So it’s worth spending some time making adjustments to the location and angle of your antenna. Remember that the change in the signal strength meter is not instantaneous, so make a small change, then wait a few seconds to see if it is better or worse before you make the next small change.
The other major improvement is that the FCC has added a site that predicts your signal strength based on the FCC database of information about the broadcast stations and terrain: http://www.fcc.gov/mb/engineering/maps/. Enter your address, and it will show your location on a Google map, and a list the stations you should be able to receive in order of signal strength. It’s not perfect, because it’s based on theoretical calculations, but it’s a good start. And like www.antennaweb.org, it gives you the compass heading from your location to the transmitter, which can help you aim a directional antenna. (Some antennas are omni-directional, which means they work in all directions, so you don’t need to aim them.)
This new information would have been good to have a year ago, but now that we have it, we may be able to find a way to make that elephant in the room a little smaller.
There was high drama in the U.S. broadcast business over the last week, about 22,000 miles high. That’s where Sirius XM (the merged satellite radio companies) have their geosynchronous satellites in orbit. And the whole system was on the verge of crashing down (financially, not literally) because a major debt payment was due today, and the company about to declare bankruptcy. The debt had been bought up by EchoStar, the company that owns the Dish Network satellite TV service. Some analysts believe that the debt purchase was an attempt to take over the company.
At the eleventh hour, Sirius XM managed to put together a deal with Liberty Media that will save the company, at least for now. Liberty owns DirecTV, the Dish Network’s rival. Liberty will loan Sirius XM enough money to make the current debt payment, as well as one that will come due later this year. In return, Liberty gets representation on the board of directors and ownership of a bit less than half of the company. And Sirius XM lives to keep trying to make satellite radio work.
The economic downturn hit Sirius XM especially hard, since it put the brakes on new car sales, and the company depends on new cars to deliver new subscribers. It’s not clear why either of the satellite TV companies want to have a piece (or all) of the company, because there is little overlap in their technology. Perhaps it is so that they can cross-market the two services, or offer bundle deals. Or maybe DirecTV just want to poke a finger in Dish Network’s eye. In any case, it will be interesting to see how this space war will turn out.
Sure, you may have gone to www.antennaweb.org to find the headings for the television broadcast stations in your area, but have you ever wondered where those towers are, and what they look like? Wonder no more, thanks to Cavell Mertz & Associates, a Virginia based engineering consulting firm. They’ve mashed up the FCC broadcast database with Google Earth. By selecting different categories, you can see the transmitter locations for AM or FM radio, analog or digital television, microwave, and more. Here’s an example of what you can find if you go looking for the Philadelphia area antenna farm in the Roxborough section of the city.
